Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 65, No. 399, January 1849Various
History
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 65, No. 399, January 1849
Various
England -- Periodicals; Scotland -- Periodicals
years of frightful warfare, the legitimate monarch, and legal order
of succession, were set aside in both countries; queens were put
on the thrones of both instead of kings, and England enjoyed the
satisfaction, for the diffusion of her revolutionary propagandism,
of destroying the securities provided for the liberties of Europe by
the treaty of Utrecht, and preparing a Spanish princess for the hand
of a Bourbon prince.
Not content with this memorable and politic step, and even after
the recent disasters of France were actually before their eyes, our
rulers were so enamoured of revolutions, that they could not refrain
from encouraging it in every _small_ state within their reach.
Lord Palmerston counseled the Pope, in a too celebrated letter, to
plunge into the career which has terminated so fatally for himself
and for Italy. Admiral Parker long prevented the Neapolitan force
from embarking for Sicily, to do there what Lord Hardinge was nearly
at the same time sent to do in Ireland. We beheld the Imperial
standards with complacency driven behind the Mincio; but no sooner
did Radetzky disperse the revolutionary army, and advance to Milan,
than British and French diplomacy interfered to arrest his march,
and save their revolutionary protégé, the King of Piedmont, from the
chastisement which his perfidious attack on Austria in the moment of
her distress merited. The Ministerial journals are never weary of
referring to the revolutions on the Continent as the cause of all
the distress which has prevailed in England, since they broke out
in last spring: they forget that it was England herself which first
unfurled the standard of revolution, and that, if we are suffering
under its effects, it is under the effects of our own measures and
policy.
Strange and unaccountable as this perverted and diseased state
of opinion, in a large part of the people of this country,
undoubtedly is, it is easily explained when the state of society,
and the channel into which political contests have run, are taken
into consideration. In truth, our present errors are the direct
consequence of our former wisdom; our present weakness, of our
former strength; our present misery, of our former prosperity.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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